


Turning Saints Into The Sea

by Haberdasher



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family Issues, Gen, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25559662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: A brief account of the life and death of one Evan Lukas.
Relationships: Naomi Herne/Evan Lukas
Comments: 14
Kudos: 26





	Turning Saints Into The Sea

Evan Lukas was never expected to be the Lukas family heir, and perhaps that was what saved him, or at least allowed him to get as far as he did.

His sister Anne was five years older than him. She resisted her younger brother’s attempts to get to know her at all costs, preferring to wander the grounds of the family estate on her own. She was coolly cordial to all who visited the family home, never grew attached to any of the ever-rotating cast of nannies and tutors who tended to the Lukas family children, eschewed music and stories in favor of sitting silently by herself.

She was, in short, a Lukas to the core.

Evan suspected that there was less pressure on him because her position as likely family heir was already clear by the time he was old enough to speak, or to have not speaking be a choice for him to make. Likely it was better than the alternative, all things considered.

Still, though, Evan wished he could have had a nice long conversation with his older sister at least once in his life, had a true meeting of the minds between the two of them. Maybe then he would understand her better, and she him in turn. Maybe then he would see the appeal in the loneliness that had been ground into her from such a young age, a loneliness than he himself never quite accepted.

Anne wasn’t Evan’s only sibling, though, at least not initially. A year and a half after he was born, another baby girl came along, a younger sister that was given the name Elizabeth. She came to use the name Lizzie, the name nicked from that of a character in one of her favorite novels.

Lizzie loved stories. She could devour novels in no time at all, and would spout off facts about her favorites to anyone who would listen and some who wouldn’t. She named the individual animals that lived upon the family estate and waved to them, greeting them enthusiastically as they passed by. If she wasn’t talking, she was usually singing or humming to herself, her presence clear from a distance if one simply listened closely enough. She once kicked one of her nannies for not letting her read a book and complained that her previous nanny was much nicer, even mentioning the previous nanny by name.

Evan assumed that Lizzie was informed at some point of how unbecoming her behavior was for a member of the Lukas family and that she just refused to adapt accordingly, but perhaps nobody spoke to her about it until it was too late. If they did, after all, it wouldn’t have been within young Evan’s earshot.

The children of the Lukas family were generally tended to separately as often as possible, so Evan hadn’t even noticed that he hadn’t seen Lizzie all day long until his mother announced at dinner that she had been sent away to live with distant relatives, never to return.

Evan always wondered if that was true. It was possible, certainly, but if Lizzie was living with relatives, they were distant enough that he never saw her again, not even at the funerals that seemed to be the one thing that always brought far-flung members of the Lukas family together. Sending her away like that would take an awful lot of work, too, and more than that, it would take an awful lot of coordinating with Lizzie’s new guardian(s)-to-be, many conversations necessitated by the transfer that were never the sort of thing his parents sought out if they could avoid them.

When Evan grew older, he wondered if Lizzie’s removal from the Lukas family had been rather more direct than he had been told, if she had been sacrificed to the family faith in a way more gruesome than a mere change of scenery, if she had been left to rot in the Lonely until nothing but her skeleton would remain on that strange and distant shore.

Evan was informed about the Lonely not long after Lizzie’s removal, and while the two were never directly connected, Evan always suspected that they had hoped to wait longer, wait until he was more ready for the information they would give him, but they wanted to explain their actions to him before he grew to resent them for taking away the only sister he ever really knew.

(If that was their goal, well, they were too late for that.)

Evan didn’t fully understand. Sure, being alone was nice sometimes, he could get that, but sometimes you had to spend time with people too. How could anyone spend all their time being lonely? How could you worship a god that was only one end of that spectrum? 

Evan’s elders tried to answer his questions, but their responses never quite made sense in his mind, and the frustrated looks on their faces made it clear that the feeling was mutual, that they couldn’t understand his position on the matter. Either Evan himself was missing something, or... or it was the rest of the family that was.

After a few cycles of mutual misunderstanding, Evan nodded and said that he would try his best, but he suspected that he was already branded as a nonbeliever by the time that discussion came to a close, much as he pretended to toe the family line for years thereafter.

Evan was surprised that his family let him go off to uni. Surely they knew that he’d make friends there, that he would be far less isolated than he had been living at home. Perhaps they’d expected that he’d only befriend kindred souls, others who knew what it was like to live on sprawling family estates and to be taught by a series of tutors and to have a family name that came with a meaning and a legacy attached, but that wasn’t the case; Evan knew that life well enough already, and he didn’t wish to dwell upon it further. 

Instead, he sought out people with lives vastly different than his own, people who had grown up trying to stand out from the crowd, people who spoke their mind without hesitation. Evan learned from them and was surprised to find that they were often eager to learn of his life in turn, that they found his experiences every bit as fascinating as he did theirs.

In his third year in uni, Evan went in on a flat with friends and sent a letter home stating that he had no interest in serving the Lonely or keeping up the Lukas family name, and that he was willing to accept whatever consequences would come of this. He received a letter shortly thereafter stating that he would not be inheriting the family fortune, that he would get a relatively small sum with which to finish his education and establish himself in the world and would then be entirely cut off from the family’s riches, and that he was not invited to the Lukas family functions (such as they were) any longer. The letter Evan got seemed polished, rehearsed, like it had been sent a number of times before and all they’d had to do was swap out a few names and details. Still, the overall outcome suited him just fine. He didn’t have any interest in remaining connected with the greater Lukas family anyway; it wasn’t as if there were much of a connection there to begin with.

Evan’s love of learning soon turned into a science degree and an interview for a lab assistant position in one of the UCL Biochemistry departments. Evan had known that the interview might well change his life, and it did in the sense that he ended up getting the job he was seeking, but as it turned out, it changed his life in more ways than one.

If Evan had been asked before that day if he believed in love at first sight, he would have vehemently denied it. Lizzie might have believed in such things, but Lizzie was gone, perhaps because of her clinging to such fanciful beliefs, and the world simply didn’t work like that from what he’d seen of it. Love had to come from connection, and connection had to come from time spent together. You couldn’t love someone you didn’t know, after all.

But when Evan first met the eyes of one Naomi Herne, another applicant waiting to be interviewed for that same lab assistant position, he knew in an instant that he loved this woman, even before he knew her name.

It wasn’t because she was particularly attractive--she looked nice enough, sure, in a drab, professional sort of way, but if they had met on the street somewhere, if he hadn’t looked her in the eye, she wouldn’t have seemed like anything special to him and he might well have walked on by without knowing what he was missing.

But that look in her eyes when they locked eyes with one another was one Evan knew too well, one of loneliness that was part choice and part necessity, coupled with a muffled longing for connections that didn’t exist. It was a look that a younger Evan had seen in his own eyes time and time again.

And so, just as Evan had managed to extract himself from a life of loneliness, he set out to do the same for Naomi.

They talked to each other, a conversation that was as comfortable as it was enlightening, the two speaking at length both before he was called in for his interview and after she got out of her own. They went on dates, one after the other, Evan always fearing that Naomi would call things off and that this date would be the last, but it never was. Evan introduced her to his friends after learning that she had none of her own, and they always got along every bit as well with her as they had with him, willing to adapt to her customary loneliness as they had been to adapt to his. She moved into his flat, which soon became _their_ flat, his assortment of shabby furnishings being completed by the addition of her own to the mix.

He said that he loved her, and she said it back with gleaming eyes that were anything but lonely now.

He thought about how to pop the question, but, well, this was something that his upbringing had left him entirely unprepared for, and Evan worried that she would say no, that she would leave him, that the love of his life would be gone forever, that he would taste loneliness once again for the sin of trying to move too quickly...

Two years after the job interview at which they met, Naomi bent down on one knee in the middle of a park and proposed to him, and Evan laughed a little, because he hadn’t expected her to beat him to the punch, before quickly and enthusiastically saying yes and kissing her on the cheek.

Evan and Naomi began to plan out their life together. Naomi wanted to have children, and while Evan hadn’t thought about it much beforehand, she won him over quickly enough when they discussed the matter. He liked the thought of it, really. A generation of Lukases that knew nothing of that huge, horrid place that he had once called home, a Lukas family that would never know true loneliness...

Perhaps he should have known that it was too good to be true.

Three and a half months before what was to be their wedding day, shortly after lunch, Evan suddenly keeled over at work, chest pain and weakness making him collapse onto the floor.

He wouldn’t live to hear the doctors’ descriptions of what had happened, wouldn’t know that he’d apparently suffered from a rare congenital heart problem all along, but in his last few seconds of consciousness, Evan suspected that somehow his family had gotten its revenge, that he had been doomed from the moment he was born a Lukas.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, consider following me on tumblr at [haberdashing](https://haberdashing.tumblr.com/)!


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